Gear & Gadgets —

A look at BlackBerry’s devices through the ages

From the Inter@ctive Pager to the Z10: how did it start and where will it go?

The revolutionary Inter@ctive Pager 900 was one of the earliest pager models, launched by RIM in 1996. It specialized in two-way messaging and had limited HTML access, though it was e-mail capable. The pager was a surefire indicator that RIM had the technology chops to manufacture a product targeted at businesses.

Pictured here is its successor, the Inter@ctive Pager 950, which was released in August 1998. Realistically, both devices were pagers first with added e-mail capabilities.

By the year 2000, RIM established the BlackBerry as the ultimate corporate accessory. However, it still needed to refine some of its technology if it wanted to hold on to that demographic.

That year, it introduced a device with a larger display and bigger form factor: the BlackBerry 957. Its debut also ushered in BlackBerry OS 2.0, whose interface soon became iconic to BlackBerry's form, as well as the thumb-controlled scroll wheel that BlackBerry devices used for years.

The BlackBerry 5810 debuted two years later in 2002 and was one of the first Java-based BlackBerry devices, as well as the first voice-enabled BlackBerry handset. Unfortunately, you had to plug in an external headset to actually talk on the thing.

BlackBerry handsets didn't get an actual earpiece until late 2002, when the 6210 handset (pictured here) was released. Many say this was the handset that really ushered in the BlackBerry revolution.

Shortly thereafter, in 2003, RIM launched the 7200 series, which featured color LCD screens packaged up in a chassis similar to the 6000 series.

RIM revamped the keyboard and in late 2004, consumers were introduced to SureType: RIM's answer to T9 predictive texting. Rather than include a separate letter for each key, SureType featured two characters (and a symbol or number) to a button and the software would then predict what the user was typing.

SureType was the beginning of many things, most notably RIM's entrance into the consumer handset market. The 7100 line, pictured here, was the first handset to include this keyboard technology.

Released in 2006 to US carriers, the 8700 handset (featured here) was the symbol that RIM had made it in the handset world. The 8700, also referred to as "Electron," went to new heights.

2005 was also the year that Palm and RIM announced they were partnering up. Palm said it would license RIM's BlackBerry Connect technology for use with its Treo 650 smartphone.

Following the success of the 8700, the BlackBerry 8100 handset—or "Pearl" as it was primarily referred to—debuted in late 2006 and traded the thumb-controlled scroll wheel for a new trackball interface. It also featured a 1.3MP camera, expansion slots, and Bluetooth technology.

In 2007, the BlackBerry Curve 8300 returned to the iconic full keyboard handset style RIM had become known for. The company also split its business into two by offering a prosumer line of devices for the more corporate-oriented and a consumer line of devices for casual users.

The Bold family was launched later in 2008 with the 9000 model and took after the Curve's simplistic, keyboard-centric design. In 2009, the form factor had shrunk a bit, but the Bold brand stuck through until 2011. In fact, RIM's last major handset launches were the 9930 and 9790 smartphones in late 2011.

The BlackBerry Storm came at a crucial time in 2008, when powerful handsets were now more prominently referred to as "smartphones" (though, let's be clear, that term already existed for a decade). Apple hit the market with its iPhone a year prior, which finally brought on some ample competition to RIM's brand and showed that touchscreen was the new "it" technology. Eventually, iPhones and Android phones became more prevalent and, later on, featured all of the e-mail and security settings a business-centric user would need—not to mention, apps.

RIM needed a product that could compete, so it introduced its first touchscreen device, the BlackBerry Storm. The Storm used SurePress keyboard technology, where the cursor tracked the fingertip along the display. Unfortunately, it didn't perform too well, and it had many mixed reviews and serious usability issues.

RIM had acquired QNX Software Systems in early 2010 to work on its next mobile operating system, which was eventually featured on the company's first tablet, the PlayBook. Unfortunately, this all happened almost two years too late.

Launched in late 2011, the PlayBook was the beginning of RIM's massive downfall. It was supposed to be the corporate equivalent to Apple's successful iPad, but it featured no e-mail service and no BlackBerry Messenger capabilities, and it lacked some essential applications. That year, RIM had ended the year 21 percent deeper in the hole than the previous quarter. It was one of the first declines of many. RIM touted small victories in its financial numbers because as long as it was still making some money—albeit, not Apple's money—it was going to survive.

Fast forward to today, 2013. RIM officially dropped its "Research in Motion" handle for the name people were calling it anyway: BlackBerry. The Z10 handset featured here, coupled with the Q10 handset, which features a physical keyboard, will ultimately determine if the company will succeed in the smartphone wars. BlackBerry completely overhauled its operating system to be in tune with what other companies offer. It borrows many elements from iOS and Android, including applications, entertainment options, and communication features, as well as a new user interface, although it's betting its money on gestures. But whether it's enough to dig BlackBerry out of the dirt is another thing entirely.

Florence Ion
Florence was a former Reviews Editor at Ars, with a focus on Android, gadgets, and essential gear. She received a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University and lives in the Bay Area.

The 900 and 950 looked like pagers, but were not "pagers first". They were wireless PDAs. I had a 950. It could send/receive email and over-the-air sync with my calendar and contacts in Outlook. It could also receive periodic stock quotes (useful, since I was in investment banking) and could even surf the web (using a Lynx-like browser over a very slow connection).

But the one thing my 950 couldn't do was act like a pager.

EDIT: BTW, I loved that device. People kept asking me "doesn't it feel like you're always attached to work?" My answer was "I'm an investment banker. I've always been attached to work. This just makes the umbilical cord longer." Blackberry made it easier for me to be away from the office, not harder.

Had an 8800 that I picked up in 2007--my old Motorola phone disappeared, and I couldn't wait for the iPhone (was still months away from release). Worked pretty well, until 2010 when I was updating the desktop software and phone OS. Something bad happened during the update, and the phone was locked into a continual startup-reboot loop. In other words, fried. Went looking for replacements, tried the current BB offerings, and the iPhone. Went with the iPhone, have never looked back.

Overall, for what it was, and at its release time, I liked the 8800. A shame that BB couldn't adapt to the mobile landscape changes brought on by the release of the iPhone, and then Android.

I hope they have some success with the latest offerings--would be good to have different ideas in the mobile arena...

The icons on the 8700 look almost exactly as the one on my old Sony Ericsson w810i. Was there something between SE and RIM back then?

Can't say i see the similarities.

I notice now that the default theme on my w810i differs from the one I see on the web. I also notice my w810i is Orange branded, just like the 8700 in the picture here. Could it be a set of Orange-only icons?

The icons on the 8700 look almost exactly as the one on my old Sony Ericsson w810i. Was there something between SE and RIM back then?

Can't say i see the similarities.

I notice now that the default theme on my w810i differs from the one I see on the web. I also notice my w810i is Orange branded, just like the 8700 in the picture here. Could it be a set of Orange-only icons?

You also might notice that the keyboard layout in the photo of the 8700 included in the article is French, and not American English.

It's funny how I flick through these and am reminded of the different jobs that issued these.

Of the pictured ones I had Big Blue, the colour version discussed under it, the 7100, the Pearl, and a Bold 9000. On top of those there was a couple of curves back in the day too.

The new job I've just started is going to issue me a phone soon and I just know it's going to be an iPhone. Much as I love my Nexus 4 and swiftkey I still think a business phone needs a proper keyboard. If it's available in time I might have to see if I can steer them towards a Q10.

Patrunjelu wrote:

hobgoblin wrote:

Patrunjelu wrote:

The icons on the 8700 look almost exactly as the one on my old Sony Ericsson w810i. Was there something between SE and RIM back then?

Can't say i see the similarities.

I notice now that the default theme on my w810i differs from the one I see on the web. I also notice my w810i is Orange branded, just like the 8700 in the picture here. Could it be a set of Orange-only icons?

Can't believe I'm going to be the first to complain about this (maybe the rest of you have given up?), but I can't stand these so-called "slide shows" - I want to look at them, but it's too much time and hassle to have to click and wait for each individual slide when there's absolutely NO reason it can't fit on a page or two and eat less of my time. As such, Flo's time putting this together had been wasted IMHO - I'm not going to read it even though I'd like to. Slide shows are a poison infecting so many web sites nowadays all in an attempt to artificially inflate page views and/or generate additional advertising revenue. I pray it backfires and causes websites resorting to it to lose enough readers to make it not worth doing. Ars has long been my primary news site (I visit it more often than Google), I'll look elsewhere if these sleazy revenue-increasing tactics start to take over.

I'm always surprised when people place the demise of RIM in the recent past. The company wasn't even relevant as the last decade went out—a BlackBerry was a corporate tool, and so was its user.

That business dominance kept things afloat for a while, but only because some people *had to* use them. In 2010, I did lots of flying, and while at least one Stieg Larsson book was being read on every flight in the US, the number of BlackBerry users slid from a majority (these are business travelers, after all) to almost zero.

There's nothing inherently wrong with devices specialized for a domain, but if the hardware and software can't keep up with consumers, then it will die. The need for BlackBerry email has passed us by like an SGI or Sun workstation.

Just reading the phrase "thumb-controlled scroll wheel" still gives me the shudders. That was consistently the first thing to fail on *every* handheld my old company purchased. And of course then you had to replace the whole friggin' device. Good riddance.

Can't believe I'm going to be the first to complain about this (maybe the rest of you have given up?), but I can't stand these so-called "slide shows" - I want to look at them, but it's too much time and hassle to have to click and wait for each individual slide when there's absolutely NO reason it can't fit on a page or two and eat less of my time. As such, Flo's time putting this together had been wasted IMHO - I'm not going to read it even though I'd like to. Slide shows are a poison infecting so many web sites nowadays all in an attempt to artificially inflate page views and/or generate additional advertising revenue. I pray it backfires and causes websites resorting to it to lose enough readers to make it not worth doing. Ars has long been my primary news site (I visit it more often than Google), I'll look elsewhere if these sleazy revenue-increasing tactics start to take over.

I happen to like the slideshow articles. Not for everyone's tastes, I guess.

There are people today that still swear by their trusty old 8700 BB and it completely mystifies me. The 8300 and 9000 series were some of the best BB phones made. Though the trackball on the 8300 was a pain to use at times when it would stick or only scroll up/down. The Storm was a disaster as BB didn't invest the amount of money in to the development as it should have. The Pearl should have never seen the light of day, I hated working with those phones with a passion. Currently the Curve 9360 is the leading BB phone that is being used followed by the Bold 9900. Here's hoping the new BB isn't a letdown as it's always fun when the BES goes down and the big wigs complain and you get to tell them "deal with it" as it's not our issue. lol

I still have my 957, in working condition :-) Pretty wild to compare it to current smartphones.

The 957 was my first. That battery on that was amazing, lasting almost Kindle-like periods of time without a charge. Or perhaps I got a lot less email back in 2000.

I've had a bunch of these over the years, up to the Bold 2. Nowadays I'm a big advocate for BYOD, an I'm using my own iPhone and a container app instead of a company-provided device. I think this is the future. Expecting your employer to pay for your phone feels like demanding that they pay for home Internet service.

The icons on the 8700 look almost exactly as the one on my old Sony Ericsson w810i. Was there something between SE and RIM back then?

Can't say i see the similarities.

I notice now that the default theme on my w810i differs from the one I see on the web. I also notice my w810i is Orange branded, just like the 8700 in the picture here. Could it be a set of Orange-only icons?

You also might notice that the keyboard layout in the photo of the 8700 included in the article is French, and not American English.

Edited to add: the next in the series, the 8100, is French as well.

Ack! Sorry about that. Switched it out for ones with American keyboards. That "q" and "a" are tricky.

I kind of almost miss the old Pearl and Curve I had. I had no issues with RIM at all but once full screen touch became the norm I had to move on. It'll be interesting to see how they perform with their new handsets. I actually preferred their keyboard layout over any other company I've dealt with.

There should probably have been a mention of the Torch and the newer devices which replaced the trackball with a trackpad (making it less failure-prone). I used Blackberries for over four years, starting with the 7290, and the later Bold model (9700) and Torch (9800) were highlights of those years.

Article failed to mention the weirdest thing about the Storm: the SurePress also made the screen give a physical button press when you selected something. Sort of like the screen was one big button instead of what we now know as a touchscreen. I remember thinking it was pretty cool at the time.

I remembering evaluating them versus the Skytel/Motorola Skywriter in the late 90s. The scrolling wheel was cool, but unless the light bounced off of the face at just the right angle, the display was completely unreadable; probably about a 5:1 contrast ratio.

Just reading the phrase "thumb-controlled scroll wheel" still gives me the shudders. That was consistently the first thing to fail on *every* handheld my old company purchased. And of course then you had to replace the whole friggin' device. Good riddance.

The scroll wheel was easy to change. I used to buy a bunch off of ebay for a 1$ a piece and the second it started to get dirty i would change it in 2 seconds. I've always found them to be solid devices. Ive only had one screen crack on me and that was because I dropped it from about 5 feet up and it fell on face first on ceramic. It wasn't even that big of a crack. I was still able to used it no problem. I work in construction and all my Blackberries have always taken serious abuse but always work. My current torch I dropped in a lake 6 months ago and other then the keyboard not working its working fine. I just use the onscreen keyboard.

The other day we were at a party and everybody started putting there phones on that table and most people with either Iphones or galaxies had cracked screen.

The scroll wheel was easy to change. I used to buy a bunch off of ebay for a 1$ a piece and the second it started to get dirty i would change it in 2 seconds. I've always found them to be solid devices.

Kind of ironic that you had to stock up on replacement items which would require DIYing your device and potentially voiding the warranty for such "solid" devices. Sounds more like shoddy engineering to me. No wonder they eventually wizened up and replaced the wheel with a trackball.

Quote:

Ive only had one screen crack on me and that was because I dropped it from about 5 feet up and it fell on face first on ceramic. It wasn't even that big of a crack. I was still able to used it no problem. I work in construction and all my Blackberries have always taken serious abuse but always work. My current torch I dropped in a lake 6 months ago and other then the keyboard not working its working fine. I just use the onscreen keyboard. The other day we were at a party and everybody started putting there phones on that table and most people with either Iphones or galaxies had cracked screen.

Yeah, the glass screens are definitely not as suited to your industry. But that's why God invented the OtterBox.

Regarding the first blackberry's this statement is totally wrong: "Realistically, both devices were pagers first with added e-mail capabilities."

People purchased the BB specifically for the email and based on my experience using and supporting the BB, the email capabilities were used way more than the paging capabilities. It's hard to imagine with that small screen but "back in the day" people devoured those few lines of connectivity.

Something you miss when you focus on the end units is the architecture BB put together to make this all work. To me that's a bit more intersting than the little 386 based handhelds. Being first helped, but it was the BB architecture that got the gov and cooperation to jump on the BB band wagon.

I've been out of it for a (long) awhile, so more than a parade of handhelds I'm more interested if every BB email still goes through Canada and if they still rely on the same wireless network that allowed BBs to function when the cell phone nets collapsed?

Kind of ironic that you had to stock up on replacement items which would require DIYing your device and potentially voiding the warranty for such "solid" devices. Sounds more like shoddy engineering to me. No wonder they eventually wizened up and replaced the wheel with a trackball.

I tend to stock up on everything. I've already bought 4 different cases for my Z10 and bunch of screen protectors. I've have more chargers for my phones then I can keep track of. The best part of the scroll wheel was that anytime my device was under a year old i would send it back to rogers and get a replacement phone.

If i had an Iphone and i could get screens that were cheap and easy to change I would probably stock up on those as well

The 900 and 950 looked like pagers, but were not "pagers first". They were wireless PDAs. I had a 950. It could send/receive email and over-the-air sync with my calendar and contacts in Outlook. It could also receive periodic stock quotes (useful, since I was in investment banking) and could even surf the web (using a Lynx-like browser over a very slow connection).

But the one thing my 950 couldn't do was act like a pager.

EDIT: BTW, I loved that device. People kept asking me "doesn't it feel like you're always attached to work?" My answer was "I'm an investment banker. I've always been attached to work. This just makes the umbilical cord longer." Blackberry made it easier for me to be away from the office, not harder.

I am glad you said something, yes the 900 was awesome I still have mine. And yes it was a mini computer, not a pager!!! But it existed before spam and data packages. What killed it for me was around the year 2000, spam email started showing up and i had to cancel the service because 99% of my emails were nothing but spam and the thing was going off every two seconds.

Oh and the lynx browser didn't come out day one, it came later a few months down the road. The outlook syncing was also pretty piss poor. I didn't end up using it after testing it. It was absolutely addictive to use at first by the way. Leave it up to spam to completely ruin a good thing.

It's strange how people keep telling how RIM is the company that pioneered smartphones. But it seems to me that they released their first smartphone in 2002. For comparison, Nokia 9000 Communicator was released in 1996, and there were even earlier phones, like the one from IBM (which name escapes me at the moment).

My first BB was the not widely known 7130 which was one of the first 'narrow' BBs without the full scale keyboard. It has taken me through the pre-3G aera and I still have it in full working condition. The battery life was exceptional, and unlike most of my other phones it never rebooted on me and crashed only once because of a defective SIM card. The processor was pretty fast for it's time and the only thing I really missed was a SD card slot so that I could use it for listening to music once in a while. Good old days.

Nowadays I have a modern full touch smartphone which is fine but I still miss real buttons and thumb-operated jog dial.